Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: Castlevania: Maria of Sorrow

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow mod that replaces Soma with Maria Renard.

1.0 What's been changed:
-Playable Maria over Soma
-Enemy/Boss HP x2
-Enemy/Boss Atk x2
-Enemy/Boss Def x2
-New Custom Weapons
-New Custom Armor
-New Custom Accessories
-Drop rates increased
-Modified HUD/damage numbers
-Modified pause screen/portraits
-Modified all red soul limits
-Some custom sprite edits to fit Maria in
-Some weapon stats modified
-Some armor stats modified
-Some accessory stats modified
-Some modified soul ability graphics (to suit Maria)
-Some new item placements throughout the castle
-Some enemy experience values increased
-Minor text alterations (to suit Maria)

1.1 more update information in Read-me
-New armor
-New accessories
-New weapons
-Re-balanced equipment for normal.
-More souls to fit Maria.
-Hard mode - Calamity mode
-Female voice added
-Mariacula screen added
-More story changes to suit Maria.
-Small armor nerfs to Chaos/Julius

1.11 update, more info in read-me
-"easy mode" patches
-fixed some weapon stats/animations

1.11 update

-Fixed a few weapon animations and stats.
-Added "easy mode" as seperate patches.
The easy mode patches were created for people that struggle to complete the game normally, they revert the 2x stats on enemies and revert the armor nerfs to accessories and armors.



1.1 update

First off, I made 2 seperate patches because I liked both HUD designs.
Minimal keeps the design as minimal as possible for more screenspace.
Simple cuts down on the hud, but keeps it looking nice still.

Changes:

-Hard mode -> calamity mode
Hard mode was changed to calamity mode.
This mode gives you the calamity armor/ring from the
start of the castle, this armor and ring give you
0 negative con so your armor is always at 0, effectively
making every and any enemy a threat.

-Voice
Soma voice changed to female to accomidate Maria.

-Mariacula
The Chaos death screen has been changed to Maria.

-Story
The story was changed around a bit to better include maria, basically,
it takes place inbetween RoB and SoTN, Shaft found maria and used magic
to send her into the futuer (why? possibly to become the new dark lord by
combining her powers with draculas during the eclipse.)

-nerfs
The armor on chaos was nerfed a bit so he's easier in normal mode and
still killable within a reasonable amount of time in both hard mode
and while using the calamity set in hard mode.
Julius also received an armor nerf as well, trying to balance out the
stats for normal to hard mode is quite challenging, since stats are
doubled the 20% buff to enemies in hard mode is technically 40% from base.

-Armors
Most armors were changed, stats as well.

-Weapons
Most weapons were changed, some stats as well.

-Souls
There were a few soul additions, all the Rush souls were updated as well.
All of maria's animal friends and guardian should be available
as soul abilities now.
Souls were also buffed a bit, some of the canon maria abilities received
small mana nerfs in order to be used frequently.

-Stats/scaling
It's tough trying to rebalance out everything with stats doubled, and
some bosses don't seems to scale properly when increasing or decreasing
stats, as so, they're not properly scaled. I tried my best to balance
out the weapons and make sure there's plenty amount of mid-game/end-game
viable weapons to have fun and choose from. Balore's second phase seems
to be a static amount of HP no matter what his base HP is changed to, it
might be located somewhere else in the data.

I like to look at the game balance in terms of maria's appearance in RoB.
she was pretty strong, did high damage, but also very squishy.

There are some new item locations on the map, some were moved around, and
some item drops from enemies were removed to accomidate the new item locations
and hard mode equipment (such as the calamity gear).




Database match: Castlevania - Aria of Sorrow (USA)
Database: No-Intro: Game Boy Advance (v. 20210227-023848)
File/ROM SHA-1: ABD71FE01EBB201BCC133074DB1DD8C5253776C7
File/ROM CRC32: 35536183